It is my understanding that "England" never considered its colonial holdings to be *part* of "England"; they were answerable to "England", influenced by her, etc... I have seen some fascinating comparisons of British and French views of their colonies... France had much more of the expanding the country sentiment than did Britain and tended, if I remember correctly, to rule more directly whereas Britain had far, far less assimilation and tended to rule through local leaders. (This is way outside anything approaching an area of expertise for me... corrections are welcome!)

The French view, and from what I know the general Non-British approach to colonization was that of a small settlement establishment and then resource extraction. While i dont know about the French specifically, and there is good examples to the contrary in Canada, this often involved usurping the local leadership and enslaving the local population to achieve these goals.

The British on the other hand rarely ended up in control of places where resource extraction along these lines was financially feasable, and in the places where it was its arguable they resorted to similar tactics. However, as they didn't often end up in places where this could work they focused on three things, strategic aquistion, market expansion and migration, none of which are particularly facilitated by enslaving or usurping the local populace. Migration was important because the Great Britian was an island with an overpopulation problem. Market expansion was important because it was the only way to get a ROI on the money it took to secure these places. Strategic aquisition was important because of the trading nature of Britains Empire and their reliance on control of the sea for their power. Ships need somewhere to repair, to replenish their supplies, and somewhere to rest. Its no good having the locals of a strategic outpost want to kill you.

Anyway, the standard practice of the British Empire was to impose their control over the existing leadership and then let them do more or less as they always had so long as they acknowledged their allegiance and friendship to the empire. Where they deviated from this approach they tended to end up in serious trouble.

Market growth and migration were key aspects of the British Empire. I recall a textbook on the ecomonic history of the north american colonies, and iirc within 20 years of Britains defeat of the French in North America the British population was double that of the French, yet the French had a 150 year advantage. The (succesful) French colonies in North America were founded in 1603, and the french were defeated on the plains of Abraham in 1759. By 1779 the population of the formerly French areas had doubled, and this process just continued.

You can see similar patterns in the Protuguese and Spanish colonies. The didnt tend to export much of their population, only that required to keep control. They didnt try to establish markets to sell to and buy from, instead the extracted all the resources they could find (in the process completely destroying and enslaving the previous occupants).

Dont get me wrong, im not saying that Britain was morally better than the French, Spanish or Portuguese. The truth was that in some respects they were unlucky, such as colonizing places where resource extraction was a viable strategy, and in others they were lucky, such as by being latecomers to the seafaring and colonization business they were able to take advantage of existing technology, but at the same time by being late they lost the chance to gain the "easy wins" that arguably in the end caused the destruction of the kingdoms that came before them. (Easy money tends to get wasted, and on a national level just destablises the country who was obtained it.)

I recommend Niall Ferguson's "Empire" for a good analysis of the British Empire. It seems a lot of people forget that England was a latecomer to the colony thing, starting out as essentially pirates who raided the Spanish and Portugese, only ending up the master of the seas after a long period of innovation and expansion.